Poles versus the Russians. Arabs versus the Jews. Americans versus”-a smile-“everyone.”
Middleton ignored him. “The Twenty-First supposedly had another job too. With the fall of Italy and an Allied invasion a sure thing, Himmler and Goering and other Nazis who’d been looting art from Eastern Europe wanted secure places to hide it-so that even if Germany fell, the Allies couldn’t find it. The Twenty-First reportedly brought truckloads to Kosovo. Made sense. A small, little populated, out-of-the-mainstream country. Who’d think to look there for a missing Cezanne or Manet?
“What the British general had found was an old Eastern Orthodox church. It was abandoned years ago and being used as a dormitory for displaced Serbs by a U.N. relief organization. In the basement his soldiers unearthed 50 or 60 boxes of rare books, paintings and music folios.”
“My, that many?”
“Oh, yes. A lot was damaged, some beyond repair, but other items were virtually untouched. I didn’t know much about the paintings or the books, but I’d studied music history in college and I’ve collected recordings and manuscripts for years. I got the okay to fly up and take a look.”
“And what did you find?”
“Oh, it was astonishing. Original pieces by Bach and his sons, Mozart, Handel, sketches by Wagner-some of them had never been seen before. I was speechless.”
“Valuable?”
“Well, you can’t really put a dollar value on a find like that. It’s the cultural benefit, not the financial.”
“But still, worth millions?”
“I suppose.”
“What happened then?”
“I reported what I’d found to the British and to my general, and he cleared it with Washington for me to stay there for a few days and catalog what I could. Good press, you know.”
“True in police work too.” The cigarette got crushed out forcefully under a yellow thumb, as if Padlo were quitting forever.
Middleton explained that that night he took all the manuscripts and folios that he could carry back to British quarters in Pristina and worked for hours cataloging and examining what he’d found.
“The next morning I was very excited, wondering what else I’d find. I got up early to return… ”
The American stared at a limp yellow file folder on the inspector’s desktop, the one with three faded checkmarks on it. He looked up and heard Padlo say, “The church was St. Sophia.”
“You know about it?” Middleton was surprised. The incident had made the news but by then-with the world focusing on the millennium and the Y2K crisis, the Balkans had become simply a footnote to fading history.
“Yes, I do. I didn’t realize you were involved.”
Middleton remembered walking to the church and thinking, I must’ve gotten up pretty damn early if none of the refugees were awake yet, especially with all the youngsters living there. Then he paused, wondering where the British guards were. Two had been stationed outside the church the day before. Just at that moment he saw a window open on the second floor and a teenage girl look out, her long hair obscuring half her face. She was calling, “Green shirt, green shirt… Please… Green shirt.”
He hadn’t understood. But then it came to him. She was referring to his fatigues and was calling for his help.
“What was it like?” Padlo asked softly.
Middleton merely shook his head.
The inspector didn’t press him for details. He asked, “And Rugova was the man responsible?”
He was even more surprised that the inspector knew about the former Kosovo Liberation Army commander Agim Rugova. That fact was not learned until later, long after Rugova and his men had fled from Pristina, and the story of St. Sophia had grown stone cold.
“Your change in career is making sense now, Mr. Middleton. After the war you became an investigator to track him down.”
“That’s it in a nutshell.” He smiled as if that could flick away the cached memories, clear as computer jpegs, of that morning.
Middleton had returned to Camp Broadsteel and served out his rotation, spending most of his free time running intelligence reports on Rugova and the many other war criminals the torn region had spawned. Back at the Pentagon, he’d done the same. But it wasn’t the U.S. military’s job to catch them and bring them to trial, and he made no headway.
So when he retired, he set up an operation in a small Northern Virginia office park. He called it “War Criminal Watch” and spent his days on the phone and computer, tracking Rugova and others. He made contacts at the ICTY and worked with them regularly but they and the UN’s tactical operation were busy with bigger fish-like Ratko Mladic, Naser Oric and others involved in the Srebrenica massacre, the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II, and Milosevic himself. Middleton would come up with a lead and it would founder. Still he couldn’t get St. Sophia out of his mind.
Green shirt, green shirt… Please…
He decided that he couldn’t be effective working from America nor working alone. So after some months of searching he found people who’d help: two American soldiers who’d been in Kosovo and helped him in the investigation at St. Sophia and a woman humanitarian worker from Belgrade he’d met in Pristina.
The overworked ICTY was glad to accept them as independent contractors, working with the Prosecutor’s Office. They became known in the ICTY as “The Volunteers.”
Lespasse and Brocco, the soldiers, younger, driven by their passion for the hunt;
Leonora Tesla, by her passion to rid the world of sorrow, a passion that made the otherwise-common woman beautiful;
And the elder, Harold Middleton, a stranger to passion and driven by… well, even he couldn’t say what. The intelligence officer who never seemed to be able to process the HUMINT on himself.
Unarmed-at least as far as the ICTY and local law enforcement knew-they managed to track down several of Rugova’s henchmen and, through them, finally the man himself, who was living in a shockingly opulent townhouse in Nice, France, under a false identity. The arrangement was that, for ethical reasons, the Volunteers’ job was solely to provide the tribunal with intelligence and contacts; the SFOR, the UN’s Stabilization Force-the military operation in charge of apprehending former Yugoslav war criminals-and local police, to the extent they were cooperative, would be the arresting agents.
In 2002, working on pristine data provided by Middleton and his crew, UN and French troops raided the townhouse and arrested Rugova.
Tribunal trials are interminable, but three years later he was convicted for crimes that occurred at St. Sophia. He was appealing his conviction while living in what was, in Middleton’s opinion, a far-too-pleasant detention center in The Hague.
Middleton could still picture the swarthy man at trial, ruggedly handsome, confident and indignant, swearing that he’d never committed genocide or ethnic cleansing. He admitted he was a soldier but said that what happened at St. Sophia was merely an “isolated incident” in an unfortunate war. Middleton told this to the inspector.
“Isolated incident,” Padlo whispered.
“It makes the horror far worse, don’t you think? Phrasing it so antiseptically.”
“I do, yes.” Another draw on the cigarette.
Middleton wished that he had a candy bar, his secret passion.
Padlo then asked, “I’m curious about one thing-was Rugova acting on anyone else’s orders, do you think? Was there someone he reported to?”
Middleton’s attention coalesced instantly at this question. “Why do you ask that?” he asked sharply.
“Was he?”
The American debated and decided to continue to cooperate. For the moment. “When we were hunting for him we heard rumors that he was backed by someone. It made sense. His KLA outfit had the best weapons of any unit in the country, even better than some of the regular Serbian troops. They were the best trained, and they could hire pilots for helicopter extractions. That was unheard of in Kosovo. There were rumors of large amounts of cash. And he didn’t seem to take orders from any of the known KLA senior commanders. But we had only one clue that there was somebody behind him. A message had been left for him about a bank deposit. It was hidden in a
